Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 - January 24, 1993)

Presented by, Lan Cantrell

The man of the moment

thurgood_marshall.jpg
Above is a younger picture for Thurgood Marshall himself.
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland July 2, 1908. His name was originally Throughgood however, in 2nd grade he changed it to Thrugood because he didn't like spelling his own name. His father was William Marshall, a railroad porter. Marshall married twice in his life, once in 1929 to a woman named Vivian Burey. Vivian died in February 1955 and he re-married to Cecilia Suyat in December of 1955. Marshall then died in 1993. He had 2 children in his second marriage. One of his sons was Thurgood Marshall Jr. who was a top aid to former President, Bill Clonton. John W. Marshall was a former United States Marshals Service Director.

The work that was done

external image Brown%20v.%20Board%20of%20Education.jpgmom_and_child_on_sc_steps.jpg

Above is a picture of a young mother and her daughter reading the paper. To the left is a book written by James T. Patterson about Brown v. Board.

Thurgood Marshall started out as a lawyer for civil rights cases. He won his first Supreme court case Chambers v. Florda (1940) when he was only 32 years old. He was made Chief Counsel of the NAACP that very same year. He won a majority of his cases which included Smith v. Allwright (1944), Shelley v. external image moz-screenshot.jpgKraemar (1940), Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents in 1950. The most well known case fought by Marshall is his Brown v. Bored of Education of Topeka which created the ruling "Separate but equal" which would ban segregation of all schools, laying the ground work for other civil rights projucts such as the Little Rock 9.

A Continuation

During the 1950s, Thurgood Marshall developed an unfriendly relation to J. Edgar Hoover, who was director of the FBI. In 1956, he privately praised Hoover's campaign to try and discredit T.R.M. Howard, who was civil rights leader from Mississippi. During a national tour Howard criticized the FBI's failure to investigate cases like the 1955 killers of George W. Lee and Emmett Till. Strangely enough however, two years previous to this Howard arranged for Marshall to deliver speech at a rally know as Regional Council of Negro Leadership which was days before the Brown v. Board ruling.
Eventually President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. This was a group of Democratic Party Senators who were led Mississippi's James Eastland. Marshall remained on that court until 1965.

The Outcome

Marshall changed the way Americans thought about Civil Rights, and he helped jump start many of the Supreme Court cases that was a large deal in the Civil Rights Movement. In the long term run he was able help gain more rights starting with the ruling of “Separate, but Equal” which started a majority of the civil rights laws that helped African Americans gain more rights.

Below are two videos of Thurgood. The first one is about Thurgood Marshalls work on Brown v. Board of Education. The second is an overall view on Brown v. Board of Education.